Thanks for giving your off the cuff opinion against a consensus of people studying the question
> which would necessarily skyrocket the land value tax to produce the same tax revenue at the end of the day -- would be extremely distortionary.
It's distortionary against the existing distortions, by reducing them.
Anything reducing tax distortions is "distortionary" by your argument's logic
Why don't you educate yourself? Starting here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_tax
As you can plainly see, land value tax is hardly the centerpiece of strategies to minimize distortion. In fact, it's left for the end of the last section of the article. Because while it's a proposal for sure, it's certainly anything but a consensus, in reality.
That said your opinion is clearly not gathered by expert reading, because I've done that reading and it comes to a different conclusion.
If you're interested in optimal taxation, I'd skip reading Wikipedia page and just go read the 2008 Mankiw literature review on "optimal taxation in theory and practice" instead. It doesn't touch land value taxation (which is a niche topic) but is very accessible and a good read.
Second, when metropolitan LVT is studied, the theoretical social benefits are large bordering on the absurd. Here's a study by the NY fed:
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/econo...
It massively reduces income and wealth inequality (lots of inequality is tied up in urban real estate ownership).
But that has nothing to do with land value tax being the distortion-minimizing solution for optimal taxation -- which it isn't -- and is what I was originally responding to.
So then I'm not sure you're even disagreeing with me.
But proposing to replace income and sales taxes with land value taxes, making it the primary tax -- which would necessarily skyrocket the land value tax to produce the same tax revenue at the end of the day -- would be extremely distortionary.